Your snood (a pantoum)
Quick, Woman, in your net
Catch the silver I fling.
Gather in your hair my sweat
And spittle as I weep and sing.
Catch the silver I fling
Of sleepless nights and sodden sheets
And spittle as I weep and sing
Of barren empty city streets
And sleepless nights and sodden sheets
And eyes assured of certain certainties
Whose barren empty city streets
Are twisted with deformities
And eyes assured of certain certainties
that glare at simple innocence
So twisted by deformities
Their loves become antitheses
And glare at simple innocence
And me, an outlandish stranger.
Your love became a synthesis
Of hope and grief and laughter
And I no more a stranger
Gather from your hair my debt
Of hope and grief and laughter
Caught, woman, in your net. The poem above alludes to an erotic work of Irish poet, W.R.Rodgers (1909-1969), "The Net."
1 comment:
The Net
Quick, woman, in your net
Catch the silver I fling.
O I am deep in your debt.
Draw tight, skin tight, the string
and rake the silver end.
No fisher ever yet
Drew such a cunning ring.
Ah, shifty as the fin
Of any fish this flesh
That shaken to the shin
now shoals into your mesh,
Bursting to be held in.
Purse proud and pebble hard
Its pence like shingle showered.
Open the haul and shake
The fill of shillings free
Let all the satchels break
and leap about the knee
In shoals of ecstasy.
Guineas and gills will flake
at each gull-plunge of me.
Though all the angels, and
Saint Michael at their head
Nightly contrive to stand
On guard about your bed
Yet none dare take a hand
But each can only spread
his eagle-eye instead.
But I, being man, can kiss
and bedspread eagle too;
All flesh shall come to this
Being less than angel is,
Yet higher far in bliss
As it entwines with you.
Come, make no sound my sweet
Turn down the candid lamp
And draw the equal quilt
Over our naked guilt.
W.D. Rodgers
The Penguin Book of Irish Verse [ISBN 0-14-05826-5]
pg. 376
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